Saturday, March 06, 2010

NHL may skip Winter Olympics in far off tropical crime haven

Already, " “roughly 5,000 people were forced out” of their homes to create room for (Russian) Olympic facilities but that “thanks to the corruption and incompetence of authorities,” those people have not been “adequately compensated for their property or been given equivalent housing elsewhere, as they were promised.”"...

Sochi is too far away for its fans to care, the N.H.L. argues. With an eight-hour time difference between Sochi and the Eastern time zone, some games there would be played when most American viewers are working or asleep.

Television money is involved. When the rights to the Sochi Olympics and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro are up for bid late this year, the two expected bidders, NBC and ESPN, will need to know whether the N.H.L., which supplied

140 players for the Vancouver Games, will play again. If not, the bids will probably be lower.

•Another factor for NBC is that its N.H.L. contract for Sunday afternoon and postseason games ends after the 2011 playoffs.

If N.H.L. players are not promised for Sochi, a new NBC deal could be jeopardized. If the N.H.L. does not pause its season for the Olympics, another complication is that

many of its European players may insist on joining their national teams anyway. Especially the Russians, who were co-favorites with Canada but failed miserably in Vancouver.

And who’s to say that Putin, knowing what Canada’s hockey gold medal in Vancouver meant to that nation, would not demand that his country’s best players, like Alex Ovechkin and Ilya Kovalchuk,

interrupt their obligations to the N.H.L. to compete for Mother Russia in Sochi.

Would those Russian players defy Putin’s orders? If they did depart, how would the N.H.L. respond? If they didn’t, how would Putin respond?

If the Russians jumped their N.H.L. contracts for two weeks to join their national team in Sochi, why wouldn’t at least some N.H.L. players from Canada (hoping to defend their gold medal), the United States, and especially other European nations — Sweden, the Czech Republic, Finland and Slovakia — want to go to Sochi, too? If that happened,

N.H.L. players stocked the Canadian and United States teams in Vancouver.

But if those teams were to send only college or amateur players to Sochi, the Russians would surely accuse them of conceding the Olympic tournament.

The N.H.L. teams could fine players who leave for more than two weeks to play in Sochi, perhaps suspend them. ...

Questions about the Sochi site add to the situation. The Winter Games there would be an “economic and ecological catastrophe,” Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister, told Foreign Policy magazine last week.

He has decided to build these ice rinks in the warmest part of the warmest region. Sochi is subtropical. There is no tradition of snow or hockey there. In Sochi, we prefer football, volleyball and swimming. Other parts of Russia need ice palaces. We don’t."...

He added that “roughly 5,000 people were forced out” of their homes to create room for Olympic facilities but that “thanks to the corruption and incompetence of authorities,” those people have not been “adequately compensated for their property or been given equivalent housing elsewhere, as they were promised.”"

0 Comments:

Links to this post:

About

Baseball blog & comments on XM MLB 89 and others that "define the daily discourse" for money in order to please Bud Selig or vanity publisher bosses. I agree with Doug Pappas' statement: "Any writer meeting the Commissioner’s standards of ‘good journalism' should be fired.” I'm also a 'Saves Scholar.' Not affiliated with XM.